/library/oar/handle/123456789/15625 2025-12-27T05:40:23Z 2025-12-27T05:40:23Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/141317 2025-11-14T13:49:36Z 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Once I forget : poems Abstract: Once I Forget is a bilingual poetry collection (originally in Maltese, translated into English by Aaron Aquilina and John Martin) that explores themes of exile, memory, loss, and the indelible bond with the village of Ħad-Dingli, Malta. Divided into two sections — “Once a Village” and “Forgetting Everything” — the poems trace the poet’s departure from his childhood home, the erosion of memory with age, and the persistent pull of place and identity. Through vivid imagery of cliffs, swallows, village pumps, and red fields, Portelli navigates the tension between forgetting and remembrance, culminating in a meditative acceptance of transience. The preface by Prof. Norbert Bugeja frames the work as an epilogic awakening to memory’s fragility, positioning it within a lineage of exile poetry from Neruda to Walcott.

2025-01-01T00:00:00Z Aquilina, Aaron /library/oar/handle/123456789/141026 2025-11-10T09:20:34Z 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Camp on campus : love’s labour’s lost’s queer scholar Authors: Aquilina, Aaron Abstract: This article reconsiders Love’s Labour’s Lost in view of contemporary antagonisms between experts and nonexperts. The link is both thought-provoking and illuminating. The first section explores this tension as it emerges through Shakespeare’s inchoate figure of ‘the scholar’, at once upheld and undermined. Here, the scholar-figure hovers between common and elite, erudite and buffoonish, utterly refined and hopelessly base. ‘He’ is also distinctively set apart from ‘she’: the women of the play who prove themselves much more worldly than their wordy counterparts. The second section furthers this particularly gendered portrayal and follows Berowne’s peculiar navigation of this dichotomy, noting his camp queerness as an ironic paradox that functions beyond binary dualisms and which points, through queer failure, to a possible method of dismantling today’s corrosive political rhetoric.

2025-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/141007 2025-11-07T15:15:58Z 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: The eloquence of salt : notes on poetry and poetic voice in the Mediterranean Abstract: The atmosphere at the Biennale was pregnant with the momentum that each of us, as budding practitioners, had already ramped up over the very first years of the new century. But the conversations on Bari's lungomare, the city's distinctive waterfront, were also heaving with the concerns we were trying to respond to: the spike in the arrivals of thousands of migrants who had set out from North Africa's politically simmering shores, the blockade of the Gaza Strip a year earlier and the tensions that were rising towards war and bloodshed in December of that year, the growing impact of climate change across our shores. With fellow poets from Cyprus, Palestine, Italy, Greece, Sicily, Spain, Tunisia and Egypt, I remember talking about the issues coming my way as I grappled with a new poetic idiom in the Maltese language, just as my island-home was living through the first years of its European Union membership: as a community of young writers back then, we were trying out and exchanging new ways of voicing the islands' rapidly shifting cultural, political and demographic landscape. [excerpt]

2025-01-01T00:00:00Z Aquilina, Mario /library/oar/handle/123456789/139442 2025-10-01T13:11:18Z 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Essays beyond borders : writing with place Authors: Aquilina, Mario Abstract: The essays in this collection all begin from a conscious effort to think from, with, and in a place. They seek to stay, to linger, to absorb, and to be present. They attend to physical spaces, the sensations they provoke, and the memories they evoke. In so doing, they inevitably move, digress, and depart as, in their essayistic spirit, they engage in reflection, contemplation, and a continuous attempt to make sense of experience. The places and spaces inhabited by these essays give witness to a range of human experiences. Some of them are recognisable in their local colours and flavours. The Maltese stone, with its golden hues and crumbly impermanence recurs, as does the sun with its never ending and sometimes oppressive brilliance. The essays take us to places marked by the stamp and weight of history, but they also make us feel the grief for that which has been or will be lost. Dust drifts across the digital pages of this collection. It rises from the ruins of the metaphorical assaults of time but also from the all too real threat of human greed and destructive wars. The sense of having lost one’s home, even when one is still living in it, is something that several essays in this collection confront. Sometimes, even the body that carries us or the mind that we inhabit makes us experience similar states of dispossession, and it is this distance from ourselves that provides us with the reflective space needed for thought to appear. Occasionally, however, the essays make us feel what it means to feel at home in our bodies and in the spaces we inhabit, and the essayists assay to make their way through a difficult, but also beautiful world that still demands to be tasted and tested in its subtle complexity. These essays persevere. They hope. They search, and sometimes, they find.

2025-01-01T00:00:00Z